Birthplace of Governor Dan Moody
Taylor, Williamson County, Texas
Marker Inscription
A crusader for integrity in public office. Born in Taylor, Williamson County; son of Daniel and Nancy Elizabeth Robertson Moody. At 16 entered University of Texas, where he completed law school. After World War I service, won election to the office of county attorney, then an appointment by Governor Pat Neff to District Attorney, Travis and Williamson counties. Won statewide notice for prosecutions of Ku Klux Klansmen in notorious flogging cases, and was urged by friends to run for Attorney General of Texas. He won this office, and served 1925-1927 in an era of alleged corruption. Moving to halt kickbacks on highway contracts, he recovered for Texas hundreds of thousands of dollars. In 1926 ran for governor on his record as Attorney General, and was elected. Inaugurated when he was 33, he was youngest man ever to take oath for that office. During his terms, 1927-1931, Texans' faith in their state government was restored. Great reforms were made in the State Highway Department and state penitentiary system. After retirement from the governor's office, he practiced law, and was appointed by the President of the United States to prosecute tax evader. He married Mildred Paxton; they had two children.
Erected by Texas Historical Commission
The Story
Dan Moody was born in this Williamson County town and rose fast: law school at sixteen, service in World War I, and a reputation as a reformer who won national attention prosecuting Ku Klux Klan floggers. Elected attorney general and then, at thirty-three, the youngest governor in Texas history, he served 1927–1931 and made his name cleaning up highway contracts and state institutions in an era shadowed by corruption.
Why it matters
Moody's career embodies the Progressive-era faith that honest, energetic government could root out graft and check extralegal violence like the Klan's.
Own a business near here? Add it to the map.
Related people
- · Dan Moody
- · Pat Neff
- · Mildred Paxton Moody
Themes & tags
Nearby & related markers
Dr. James Lee Dickey
Taylor, TX
Born in 1893 and trained at Meharry Medical College after service in World War I, Dr. James Lee Dickey settled in Taylor as its only African American physician. He led the fight against a 1932-33 typhoid outbreak, pushed to improve the town's water supply, and opened a clinic that grew to serve the whole region. His advocacy reached well beyond medicine into school bonds, housing, recreation, and civil rights, earning him recognition as the community's Man of the Year in 1952.
Willow Ranch Negro School
Travis County, TX
Across the rural South and Southwest, Black communities educated their children in separate, unequal schoolhouses through the long decades of Jim Crow. A "Negro school" like this one in Travis County was often built and sustained by the very families it served, because the state provided so little to Black education. Small and plain, such buildings were nonetheless engines of literacy, faith, and community for African American families shut out of white classrooms.
Anti-Slaveholding Union Baptist Cemetery
Round Rock, TX
This Williamson County graveyard is tied to the family of pioneer Baptist preacher Freeman Smalley and to the nearby Anti-Slaveholding Union Baptist Church — a congregation whose very name declared its opposition to slavery in antebellum Texas. Though the oldest surviving stone dates to 1853, Freeman Smalley, Jr., is believed to have been the first buried here in 1849, and the land was formally deeded to the church's trustees in 1854.
Mount Arie (Mount Ararat) Missionary Baptist Church
Bartlett, TX
In 1898 Black laborers who came to Bartlett for the cotton harvest gathered with local families to found what began as Mount Arie Missionary Baptist Church, calling in a minister from Temple to help organize it. Over the decades the congregation moved repeatedly — across a county line, then to steadier ground — weathering lean years and modernizing its building. In 1980 it took the name Mount Ararat and, having begun to integrate after 1977, carried its founders' traditions into a new brick sanctuary.